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09/09/2003

Poll: Who has the tougher job -- Howard Dean or Marty Markowitz?

In my increasing skepticism of Howard Dean, I've begun to wonder less whether he has the foreign policy or military experience to be president, but whether he has the domestic experience. No disrespect to Vermont, but does being governor of that state expose one to any of the real problems we face, at the scale at which they have to solve them?

Or, put another way, I wonder whether Howard Dean is really any more qualified, by experience, than Marty Markowitz, the borough president of Brooklyn. (Who, for those of you outside New York, is not qualified to be president of the United States.) Let's start collecting some statistics:

Number of people in poverty in Vermont: 65,000
Number of people in poverty in Brooklyn: 480,000

I remember the late Senator Moynihan once blowing up at some smug governor, perhaps Tommy Thompson when he was governor of Wisconsin, who claimed to have solved the welfare problem in his state. The differences in scale between poverty in New York, Illinois, California, etc., and a state like Wisconsin where essentially the entire problem of poverty and welfare was concentrated in a single small city (Milwaukee) made it absurd to draw analogies between the two. Moynihan was right about Wisconsin, and it goes double for Vermont.

Again, this is not to say that Dean isn't capable, brilliant, able to solve all our problems. But the Vermont experience just doesn't prove it.

Posted by on 09/09/2003 at 12:51 AM in Decembrist archives |

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